Days of Photography

Want to become a better golfer? Practice. Want to master the unicycle? Practice. Want to become a better photographer? Practice, by taking as many photographs as you can as often as you can. A great way to start is to take a picture every day. Carry your camera on your commute. Find time during your lunch hour to take a stroll and make a photo. Walk out your back door every morning and look for a new photograph. However you do it, the act of bringing the camera to your eye, engaging your mind in seeing photographically, working with composition and exposure and all those other technical issues that go into making a photograph—not to mention the metaphysical aspects of putting yourself in a photographic frame of mind—are sure to pay dividends. And if I told you I could guarantee that you’d be a vastly improved photographer in just a year, wouldn’t you jump at the chance?

Your subject can be anything you can imagine, tied together by a theme you may not even know: your neighborhood, the sky, a favorite color, close-ups, wide-angles… whatever you can imagine can make for a great premise around which to organize your project.

If you’re looking for “photo-a-day” inspiration, check out Photojojo’s advice and examples of daily photo projects. Or take a look online for what other photographers have done—like photographer Edward Crim who is spending 2009 making a photograph every day in his city’s largest park. Or Taylor McKnight, the photographer who started Project 365 in 2004 to document every single day of his life for a year. He carried out the project in ’04, ’06 and it lives on today by way of a Flickr group of photographers interested in photographing for 365 days too.

Perhaps the most moving example of taking a picture every day comes from Jamie Livingston, the photographer whose moving project saw him make a Polaroid photograph every day for 18 years, spanning every day of his life from the mundane, to the wonderful to, ultimately, his last.

photojojo.com

flickr.com